01 May 2025, Volume 24 Issue 3

  

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  Aesthetic Wealth Distribution, Time System, and Communism: Marxist Aesthetic Philosophy of Time

  LIU Yanshun

  2025, 24(3): 5-15.

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  Aesthetic philosophy of time is one of the most important dimensions in aesthetics. The core of Marxist aesthetic time philosophy is the aesthetic temporality of a communist life. The revolution of Marxist aesthetics in Western aesthetics is primarily the revolution of aesthetic temporality. Starting from this, they regarded aesthetic wealth as one of the forms of wealth, restored and criticized the capitalist time system and time exploitation as the main forms of aesthetic wealth distribution inequality, and used communist aesthetic life as a timely basis for future social construction. From the perspective of restoration, they conducted field investigations into the actual situations of work and life among the working class, preserved these conditions through the lenses of interpersonal aesthetics and work aesthetics, and obtained first-hand materials. From a critical perspective, they argue that the root of the capitalist time system lies in private ownership, and the exploitation of aesthetic wealth is primarily based on time exploitation. In terms of construction, they criticized the asceticism of religion and capitalism based on the communist aesthetic time system, especially the relationship between the free time system and aesthetic life, and depicted a beautiful blueprint.
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  The Revolutionary Vision of Restoring the Aesthetic Essence: Lefebvre′s Modern Interpretation of Marx′s Theory of Human Liberation

  LI Shule, LIU Zhihua

  2025, 24(3): 16-23.

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  Henri Lefebvre′s early and mid-period critique of everyday life focuses on two central themes, with the ″revolutionary vision of restoring the aesthetic essence″ constituting the core objective of his theory of human liberation. The recovery of the richness and totality of everyday life through momentary practice most exemplifies the poetic and creative dimensions of Lefebvre′s critique. However, this conception is not mystical or abstract but rather tangible and specific. It is only within Lefebvre′s framework of ″rediscovering true Marxism″ that the relationship between the ″revolutionary conception of transforming the moral order″ and the ″revolutionary vision of restoring the aesthetic essence″ can be fully understood. The former relies on agents of social-historical transformation, while the latter is rooted in authentic individuals within everyday life, drawing its substance from the materials provided by daily existence. The ″revolutionary vision of restoring the aesthetic essence″ is essentially a path towards human liberation, where individuals continually transcend their alienation and ultimately achieve unity between man and society. Lefebvre proposes two paths to liberation: the Sisyphus-like path, where alienation is progressively overcome in everyday life through the accumulation of knowledge and experience, bringing one closer to the ideal of the ″total man″; and the Dionysian path, where, in moments of festivity or special instances, the alienated aspects of the self are reintegrated.
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  Biopolitics, Self-care and Ethical Aesthetics: Three Problematic Dimensions of Heller′s Critical Absorption of Foucault

  LIU Can

  2025, 24(3): 24-32.

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  Michel Foucault and Agnes Heller were both prominent philosophers in the second half of the 20th century. The former had a profound impact on the latter′s theoretical transformation, specifically presented in the dimensions of biopolitics and ethical aesthetics. Foucault′s later thought exhibited a clear ethical turn. He included self-care in the prescription for addressing the crisis of modernity and creatively introduced the concept of ″existential aesthetics,″ thereby generating an aesthetics-infused self-ethics. Heller associated biopolitics with ethical issues, placing particular emphasis on Foucault′s self-care theory. She proposed a personal ethics that focused on individual autonomous choice, emphasized the subject′s sensual practice of emotional management, and identified beauty as the inherent content of ethics rather than mere decoration. From Foucault′s existential aesthetics to Heller′s personal-ethical aesthetics, both focused on the sensuous modes of ethical subjectivity, providing an important aesthetic path for the reconstruction of ethical subjects. They also offered a new opportunity for paradigmatic transformation in the bidirectional interaction between contemporary ethics and aesthetics, jointly advancing the ethical turn in contemporary aesthetics.
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  The Liberatory Dimension of Marx′s and Rancière′s Aesthetic Politics

  HAN Zhenjiang

  2025, 24(3): 33-41.

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  In the Paris Manuscripts, Marx explored the path from human nature to aesthetic liberation. This dimension of aesthetic-political emancipation has found strong resonance in the thought of contemporary philosopher and aesthetician Jacques Rancière. Marx posited that human essence lies in free and conscious life, and that the objectification of human essence represents the objectifying activity of all human life forces, embodying the freedom and joy of life. From the perspective of sensory liberation, the realization of communism, defined as the comprehensive emancipation of human free life activities, also constitutes a form of aesthetic liberation. Rancière, however, diverges from Marx by extending the notion of sensory deprivation caused by alienated labor to encompass the unequal sensory distribution imposed by society upon the ″part of those that have no part″. He further concretizes Marx′s concept of species-being liberation by reinterpreting it as the aesthetic liberation of the oppressed within social hierarchies. Through his inheritance and development of Marx′s early theories on sensory and aesthetic liberation, Rancière, as a reader of the Paris Manuscripts, has effectively modernized and contextualized Marx′s dimension of aesthetic-political emancipation.
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  Mo Yan: Rural Vision of Chinese Path to Modernization

  ZHANG Zhizhong

  2025, 24(3): 42-51.

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  This article provides an in-depth textual interpretation of Mo Yan′s novels, revealing the complex attitudes of farmers in the Jiaodong Peninsula towards the impact of modernity over the 20th century since the Anti-German War: drawing resources from local cultural traditions, seeking and obtaining the true essence of ″folk music″, and achieving positive creative results between the modernity and localization of literature. To create a new Chinese style sensory fiction with a rich and unfamiliar sensory description, to resist the harm of asceticism to human nature, as well as the alienation of human nature caused by capitalist instrumentalism, and to treat ″one-dimensional people″. Amidst the ups and downs of modernity, we pour out the suffering of farmers and the decline of rural areas, and focus more on shaping the image of ″ruthless people″ in rural areas, playing the final swan song for the heroism of farmers.
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  ″I Dwell″, Therefore I am: ″Place″ as a Generative Mechanism of Literary Meaning

  FENG Liming

  2025, 24(3): 52-62.

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  As a generative framework of meaning, ″space″ differs significantly from ″geographical region″ and ″indigenousness″. Since the mid-20th century, influenced by phenomenological ontology, humanistic geography and interpretive anthropology have positioned the concepts of place and placeness as central topics in modern humanities. While ″place-basedness″ is a concept rooted in meaning theory, its interpretive validity is limited in epistemology and truth theory. However, in literary studies, which center on meaning-making, place and place-basedness serve as critical interpretive tools. Place bridges the gap between ″situation″ and ″space″, combining the particularity of situation with the universality of space. The exploration of meaning generation in literary texts through place-basedness focuses on distinguishing textual meaning from the historical interaction between the subject and their dwelling. Place-basedness is one of the sources of the uniqueness of literary meaning, yet it is often misunderstood as a knowledge-based representation of regional cultural spirit, thereby obscuring the individuality of literary meaning
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  Questioning Evolutionary Theory in Literary Studies in the First Half of the 20th Century

  WU Zequan

  2025, 24(3): 63-76.

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  From the beginning of the 20th century to the 1920s and 1930s, evolutionary theory became increasingly dominant in Chinese literary studies. However, many scholars questioned and challenged the concept of ″evolution″. In the early 1920s, Mei Guangdi, Hu Xiansu, Zhang Shizhao, Liang Qichao, and Qian Jibo expressed doubts about the evolution of literature, arguing that the assumption that the latter is superior to the former and that vernacular is superior to classical is not valid. Later, Lu Jiye proposed the ″metamorphosis theory″ of literature, asserting that literature is neither evolutionary nor degenerative but only metamorphic. In addition to ″metamorphosis″, other literary history narrative modes such as ″transformation″, ″flux″, and ″developmental trajectory″, which differed from ″evolution″, also emerged. These narrative modes challenged the mainstream concept of literary evolution, yet they maintained complex relations with it. This historical segment of 20th-century literary studies offers valuable insights for the methodological reflection of contemporary literary research.
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  Trauma and Redemption in ″Individualisation″: The Long Season as a Modern Tragedy

  ZHANG Chun

  2025, 24(3): 77-87.

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  Directed by Xin Shuang, The Long Season is set against the backdrop of the restructuring of China′s old industrial regions in the 1990s. Through an unsolved case, it interweaves the fates of different groups of people during the transition period, presenting a tragic picture of individuals struggling and traumatised by their existential dilemmas, and their misplaced values amid drastic societal changes. The social connotation of individual destiny and historical transformations expressed in the drama is illuminated by the theory of ″individualisation″ by German sociologist Ulrich Beck and the concept of ″modern tragedy″ by British cultural theorist Raymond Williams. Drawing on Sun Liping′s theory of ″transformation and rupture″, The Long Season reveals, in the form of a suspenseful narrative, the phenomenon of the ″founding generation″ in the process of Chinese ″individualization″: on the one hand, the separation of the individual from the unitary system, and on the other hand, the reintegration of the founding generation in the absence of a corresponding social support system. This unique process of ″individualization″ has led to a rupture in identity formation and a crisis of mental trauma, which emerges in the narrative through the death and revenge of the ″second generation″. Through the narrative strategy of suspense, the ″second generation″ retrospectively review their own growing-up experience, inadvertently touching on the hidden aspects of the transformation of the era in the 1990s, and displaying the process of ″non-individualistic individualization″ of this generation.
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  The ″Child Flâneur″ in the 1990s: Retro Nostalgia Games and the Imagination of Everyday Life

  LUO Haoxi

  2025, 24(3): 88-101.

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  In recent years, as precarity in China′s economic environment has intensified, people have become increasingly eager to build a sense of reliance and continuity in the everyday crises. Closely tied to precarious experiences, the ″1990s″ has emerged as a popular theme in China′s cultural and academic fields. Beyond literature and film, video games have also become a new medium participating in this wave of nostalgia. Retro nostalgia games like Bad Kids mediate the figure of the ″Child Flâneur,″ which simultaneously serves as a game avatar, a nostalgic paradigm, and a mode of adaption. Its repertoires of ″finding joy in hardship″ and ″turning over a new leaf″ evoke two contrasting imaginations of everyday life: one that critically seeks to master and redefine everydayness amid precarity, and another that finds security through a conservative return to conventions and ideologies. The dialectical tension between these two gestures suggests that as the middle-class ideal of a ″good life″ becomes increasingly unattainable under the new normal, nostalgia serves as both a response to and an adaptation to the anxieties and uncertainties in the historical present.
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  The Intermediality of ZhuLang NiangMei: Cross-Media, Cultural Acculturation and Sun Yu′s Last Film

  DU An, XU Mingliang

  2025, 24(3): 102-115.

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  Sun Yu′s last film was the drama film Qin Niangmei, which has long been ignored by film historians. The movie Qin Niangmei was adapted from the Qian drama Qin Niangmei, which was born from the Dong oral art ZhuLang NiangMei. Director Sun Yu omitted the storyline of the heroine in ZhuLang NiangMei in the second half of her life, such as remarrying and having children. The film Qin Niangmei reflects the mutual interaction and coupling of Dong culture and Han culture, as well as the director′s romantic spirit and folk aesthetic preference. It shows the director′s continuous exploration of poetic national style and his persistent pursuit of idyllic paradise, folk spirit, and rural femininity. The intermediality of the film Qin Niangmei reflects the director′s artistic ideal of attempting to bridge the boundaries between poetry, music, dance, drama, and cinema. The gains and shortcomings of the movie Qin Niangmei reveal the tension between Sun Yu′s later artistic pursuits and the emotional structure of the ″Seventeen Years″ cinema.
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  Digital Colonialism: The Evolution and Critique of Postcolonial Theory in the Digital Age

  RU Ying, LIU Yingjun

  2025, 24(3): 116-126.

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  The widespread penetration and rapid development of digital technologies have posed unprecedented challenges to global economic, social, and cultural structures, prompting in-depth discussions within academia and society on the issue of ″digital colonialism.″ Previous studies on ″digital colonialism″ have focused on aspects such as technological control and economic dominance, calling for new theoretical perspectives to establish a comprehensive and multi-dimensional analytical framework. Within the postcolonial theoretical framework, ″digital colonialism″ shares structural similarities with postcolonialism in terms of economic exploitation, cultural alienation, and the construction of the ″Other,″ signifying a new paradigm of global cultural and economic control. Postcolonial theory provides a theoretical framework and methodology for interpreting ″digital colonialism,″ emphasizing the value of indigenous cultures and offering theoretical tools for China to identify and reflect on marginalized voices within the context of globalization. A multi-dimensional research approach helps to understand the essence of digital colonialism, promote equitable global development of information technologies, and construct an open, inclusive, and diverse digital civilization ecosystem.
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  From Film to Digital Mediatheque:Continuity and Rupture in the Visual Archive

  MIAO Yanxin

  2025, 24(3): 127-135.

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  For a long time, the study of modern visual media technologies, represented by film, television, and digital archives, has often fallen into the trap of a linear view of history centered on media perception and temporal experience of humanity: The history of visual technology development is frequently viewed as a continuous and homogeneous narrative of progress. However, with the rise of the discourse around archives in the late 20th century and the increasing normalization of archival practices, visual media technologies are no longer seen as passive carriers of text and symbols but are recognized as having their generative capacities. This shift has introduced a materialist perspective to visual studies that moves away from anthropocentric approaches. Media archaeologists who hold archives in high regard employ archival theory as a method to emphasize the discontinuities, contingencies, and similarities caused by the lag in human sensory perception among the three modern visual media technologies. At the same time, from the perspective of visual archives, they highlight the disintegration and reconfiguration of traditional archival theories and storage spaces against the backdrop of technological transitions from analog to electronic and digital.
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  Urban Social Resilience Governance from a Collaborative Perspective: Boundary Connectivity and Joint Action

  LIU Bing

  2025, 24(3): 136-147.

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  Urban social resilience is an important component of urban resilience. In contrast to the resilience of key urban facilities, the formation of social resilience requires more complex cross-boundary activities. The social governance reform guided by collaborative governance aims to enhance society′s capacity to mitigate and respond to risks from the perspective of overall national security. Urban social resilience governance needs to adapt to the characteristics of risk dispersion by conducting boundary connections and joint actions between government and society, among public sectors, and between online and offline domains to enhance social resilience. Boundary communication, boundary organizations, and boundary objects effectively reconcile the differences among actors. By leveraging digital technologies, diverse social entities can establish routine partnerships and generate multiple autonomous response networks under the activation of sudden emergencies. This meets the needs of addressing various types of social risks. Boundary perspective analysis elaborates the formation process of social resilience and provides a richer toolkit for urban resilience governance.
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  The Institutionalization Orientation and Pathways for Emergency Rescue Force Construction from the Perspective of Resilient Cities

  LIN Hongchao, LYU Zhibin

  2025, 24(3): 148-160.

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  The proposal and practice of the ″Resilient Cities″ concept have driven the evolution and renewal of urban disaster response strategies. A resilience-based urban disaster response strategy recognizes both the importance of ″robust″ measures and the uncertainty of disasters while seeking to establish a dynamic and compatible disaster perception model. This approach alleviates many issues associated with traditional ″high-confrontation″ strategies. Given the multifaceted important role of emergency rescue force construction in enhancing urban resilience, its concept should be updated based on ″resilience″ and advanced through institutionalized means. The resilience-oriented construction of emergency rescue forces is reflected in the pursuit of robustness, redundancy, and recoverability. Specific pathways for institutionalization include: strengthening the planning of emergency rescue force construction, particularly by clarifying the division of labor mechanisms among various forces; facilitating autonomous cooperation channels and obligatory complementary mechanisms among these forces; and enhancing evaluation mechanisms for the effectiveness of emergency rescue force construction.